Larry Kramer Wouldn't Be Quiet
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Larry Kramer always made sure you heard him loud and clear. He was a playwright, a novelist, but he was perhaps best known for his work as an AIDS activist. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kramer sought to wake up the world to the plague that was killing millions of people through provocative demonstrations, fiery essays, and righteous anger. A world class troublemaker, Kramer died last week leaving a body of work that could serve as a lesson for this moment in American history.
Guest: Mark Harris, a journalist and writer at New York Magazine.
For a closer look at the history of ACT UP check out: United in Anger: A History of ACT UP.
This episode originally aired June 2020.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Happy New Year, everyone. It's Mary. For the past week or so, we have been rerunning episodes that really stuck with us this year. This is the last of those. Tomorrow starts a new year. And Monday, we'll be back with brand new episodes of what next. But we wanted to close out 2020, with a show that both honors the past and reminds us that it's possible for regular people to work together and save each other. |
| 0:28.4 | It's an obituary of a sort, one I've thought about a lot over the past few months. |
| 0:39.0 | When I think about Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist who died last week at the age of 84, |
| 0:45.6 | I can hear his voice, loud, urgent, filled with this righteous anger. |
| 0:52.9 | Plague! |
| 0:55.3 | 40 million infected people is a fucking plague. |
| 1:00.3 | And nobody acts as it is. |
| 1:02.9 | This is a clip that started making the rounds last week. |
| 1:05.8 | It was recorded 30 years ago. |
| 1:08.2 | Larry is expressing this frustration with the pace of HIV research and drug |
| 1:12.7 | development. We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever been in. Nothing is working. |
| 1:21.6 | None of that shit you saw on that screen is working. One of the funny things about Larry Kramer, |
| 1:26.9 | though, is that until he opened his mouth, |
| 1:30.2 | he didn't read as particularly angry. |
| 1:33.3 | Visually, what you can picture is a very unprepossessing-looking white Jewish man |
| 1:40.9 | with a thick set of glasses and a fringe of white hair. |
| 1:44.6 | Mark Harris is a journalist and a cultural critic. I heard he wore overalls a lot. |
| 1:49.3 | He wore overalls a lot. He wore a lot of big turquoise jewelry. So the visual does not quite |
| 1:57.5 | match the firebrand that you might imagine. |
| 2:01.6 | The last time Mark saw Larry, it was at a benefit for the gay men's health crisis, |
| 2:06.6 | an organization Larry founded to fight AIDS. |
| 2:09.6 | Larry was winning some kind of lifetime achievement award, |
... |
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